Review: Promised Land, starring Matt Damon, John Krasinski

The lesson of Promised Land is deceptively simple: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. But what is good, and what is true?

Perhaps knowing that audiences would rather go see a movie starring Jason Bourne than watch a HBO documentary about Halliburton, Gus Van Sant directs this drama co-written by its co-stars — Matt Damon and John Krasinski.

Based on the Dave Eggers short story, the film is ultimately an imperfect but thought-provoking cinematic eclogue. Set in the American heartland, the pastoral scenery sets up Van Sant’s romanticized milieu, with an aerial view of a bus moving along the seam of a patchwork farmland quilt, rounding past the town’s legion hall to its lone motel. One of its passengers is Damon’s fracking salesman Steve, a killer closer disguised as an aw-shucks former farm boy. Steve is so well-rehearsed in the fine art of sincerity that he seems to have talked himself into believing the company line, too. Up for a big promotion, he is in rural Pennsylvania to close the leases on a community key to his company’s expansion plans. Sue (Frances McDormand) is his sardonic partner in crime. Their act — and the movie’s — works almost perfectly.

To properly infiltrate the bucolic batch of barns, buffalo check and clacking screen doors, Steve and Sue’s strategy is to cultivate trust by blending in: driving a mud-spattered old-model Bronco and swapping city slicker gear for Dockers. Browsing the flannels at the local Rob’s Guitars Guns & Groceries emporium, the titular owner is keen to help the pair’s cause — but is he greedy or simply a realist, resigned to the sad inevitability his town faces?

Methodically working their way through a list of addresses, the pair mine every last morsel of their personal experiences to cajole and mollify residents into signing on the dotted line. Steve seems a true believer, grounding his conscience in the fact that he wears his grandfather’s scuffed “Made in the U.S.A.” work boots, a touch that seems to justify his assertion that he’s “not a bad guy.” Leasing one’s land for hydraulic fracking is effortlessly lucrative, like playing the lottery! But as the town’s rural sophisticates — such as the outspoken MIT engineer turned local science teacher (Hal Holbrook) — are quick to point out, it isn’t without risk.

The oil company employees are eventually waylaid by a town vote, giving Steve time to lobby the locals and to woo Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt), another typical urban exile (actually, an elementary school teacher who went away, then came back and rediscovered the humble joys of small town life).

Next come complications — namely, Dustin (Krasinski), a slick environmentalist who, in his own way, is just as much a salesman as Steve. Armed with incendiary scientific evidence, the activist charms the elementary teacher and memorably entertains, shocks and, most importantly, scares her students with his elaborate teaching aides — fear in a handful of dust.

A generations-old rural agricultural way of life is what’s endangered, but soon it’s the salesman having the existential crisis. “I’m not a bad guy,” Damon’s Steve repeats throughout the film, to others but mostly to reassure himself; the meaning of his declaration has nuance throughout, too.

Watching the two hustlers square off — at the local bar, at town halls — is engrossing, as is the shifting ambiguity Van Sant suggests about hypocrisy and the nature of sincerity. Steve has percolating frustration about the “delusional self-mythology” of the stubborn and proud small-town farmers who “have nothing left to sell, and can’t afford to buy anything.” He’s indignant at them but also perhaps because he still at heart counts himself among them, despite the distance cultivated by his career. A monologue laying out the true meaning of “f–k-you money” is horrifying, not least because it’s probably true.

These contradictions are interesting, but they don’t last. For all the film’s talk of the domestic energy crisis, groundwater contamination and natural gas extraction-speak, Promised Land doesn’t start to feel like a moralistic issue film except for its misbegotten ending. Van Sant plays both sides well until then, when it abruptly shifts into preachy and improbable Erin Brockovich mode.